fourth doctor

We call it the pit.

In seasons past, one would have expected David Fisher’s “The Creature from the Pit” (Story Production Code 5G) to provide exactly what the title promises: a beastie in an underground labyrinth posing a deadly threat. Season Seventeen, under producer Graham Williams and script editor Douglas Adams, continues to subvert expectations, with the featured creature instead being a well-spoken interplanetary ambassador on a thwarted trade mission, albeit an envoy some two hundred feet in length, covered in a sickly green membrane, festooned with unfortunate appendages, and given to crushing people inadvertently.

Deadpan humor abounds in this story, which sees the Doctor and Romana landing on the planet Chloris—a verdant jungle world, in case the Nation-esque planet name didn’t give it away—after homing in on a distress beacon being sent out by what appears to be a giant egg shell. Unbeknownst to our time travellers, however, they have landed in the “Place of Death,” so named because anyone found there is put to death by the servants of Lady Adrasta (Myra Frances), the most powerful person on the planet thanks to her monopoly on metal. The Doctor’s curiosity about the shell leads Adrasta’s lady-in-waiting, Madam Karela (Eileen Way), to spare the Doctor and Romana, so that Adrasta can question them.

No sooner do they head off for Adrasta’s palace than a group of bandits waylays them, intent on stealing as much metal as possible, kidnapping Romana in the process. The bandits’ scruffy appearance, particularly in comparison to Adrasta’s sharply attired guards, serves to highlight her power and wealth and the poverty of the rest of the planet, but the social commentary disappears as soon as the bandits begin to speak. They come across as greedy bumpkins, driven solely by their desire for metal of any kind; their predations stem not from penury but from avarice. While their behavior does emphasize the scarcity of metal on Chloris, the comedic presentation drains them of any degree of menace or threat, a danger sapped even further when Romana just sternly orders them to let her go, which they do, with a little help from K-9.

Comedic moments in Doctor Who work best when they provide a counterpoint to the drama and the action, when they stem from the events on screen rather than being the whole purpose of a scene. The earnest yet literal-minded detective Duggan from “City of Death,” for instance, and the glib con-man Garron in “The Ribos Operation,” lighten the mood because they are juxtaposed against more serious events rather than attempting to be humorous in and of themselves. “The Creature from the Pit” feels like everyone wants in on the funny business, from veteran director Christopher Barry through to the deposed court astrologer Organon (Geoffrey Bayldon), who survived being thrown in the dreaded pit after displeasing Adrasta. When the Doctor meets Organon, after he jumps in the pit himself to escape from Adrasta’s clutches, the two exchange such a wildfire patter of witticisms and bon mots that one almost doesn’t notice the green pulsating creature stuffing itself through a doorway, trying to reach them…

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Is no one interested in history?

For all the fantastical planets and places Doctor Who has presented on screen, its location shooting has tended, for obvious financial and logistical reasons, to center within a day’s coach drive of Television Centre, making David Agnew’s “City of Death” (Story Production Code 5H) all the more striking for its quite exotic setting: Paris. Rather than dress up a London street as the City of Lights, the production team skipped over the Channel, providing some of the best location shots in the series to date. Normally, scenes of the Doctor and companion running around would be dismissed as filler, but here, the pleasant dissonance of seeing Tom Baker scampering down the middle of the Champs-Élysées, scarf flying, with nonplussed Parisian pedestrians paying him no mind, yields ample justification for the narrative interludes. No alien planet could provide such a backdrop.

Pleasantly, the story on offer lives up to the grandeur of the location. The pseudonymous duo of producer Graham Williams and former script editor Anthony Read delivers a smart tale that makes time travel integral not only to the outcome but also to the intermediate complications in which the Fourth Doctor and Romana find themselves embroiled. Just as their prior story together, “The Invasion of Time,” delved deeply (if at times awkwardly) into Gallifreyan history, adding to the series’ lore while simultaneously mining it for plot beats, Williams and Read here use the full measure of the series’ core conceit of time travel, having the Doctor travel through time within the story—itself a rarity—only to discover the Doctor’s urbane foe, Count Scarlioni (Julian Glover), got to Renaissance Florence first. Or did he?

That Scarlioni, first encountered in Paris in 1979 funding experiments and plotting grand larceny, is somehow linked to Scaroth, a green tentacled, one-eyed creature known as a Jagaroth seen in the opening scene of the first of the story’s four episodes, is obvious from the beginning; their names alone give it away. It’s the nature of the linkage that drives the intrigue and interest, with the audience learning the details slowly along with the Doctor. Indeed, there’s so much going on by the end of the first episode—time slips, thugs in Parisian bistros, an artist drawing Romana with a broken clock for a face, a plot to steal the Mona Lisa, wild experiments with chickens, and a gung-ho gumshoe—that it comes as a mild shock when Scarlioni rips off his human face to reveal the Jagaroth beneath.

More curious still, however, is why an alien might need to steal the Mona Lisa from the Louvre when he already has six of them walled up in a long-undisturbed cellar in his Parisian château…

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Remember me to Gallifrey.

Season-ending stories bring with them an inherent weight, allowing the production team to make a statement of intent, to add a flourish to their body of work, to set the tone for the season to come. Season Sixteen ratchets up the pressure on the final story, with dynamic duo Bob Baker and Dave Martin’s “The Armageddon Factor” (Story Production Code 5F) also serving as the finale of the six part Key to Time arc. Given that Baker and Martin’s last two outings provided a dismally conceived retelling of Jason and the Argonauts and an overwrought tale of shrunken clones injected into the Doctor’s brain to fight a feisty shrimp, one might hesitate granting such an important assignment to them. Thankfully, we get the Baker and Martin of “The Mutants” and “The Claws of Axos,” writers with a proven ability to quickly sketch cultures and settings without getting in the way of the action. The resulting six episode story on offer, while not entirely satisfying, nevertheless pays off the Key to Time arc in sufficient style to have made the exercise worthwhile, if not ultimately necessary.

Unlike the first five stories in the arc, “The Armageddon Factor” keeps the search for the sixth segment of the Key to Time in the foreground. Everything in the story serves the eventual resolution of the arc. Indeed, the sixth segment even has a speaking role, with Princess Astra (Lalla Ward) being the embodiment of the segment itself. The slow revelation of her dual role as princess and perspex chunk drives the tale on an emotional level and, neatly, brings the entire arc to a close.

As the story begins, Astra’s planet, Atrios, wages a long nuclear war with its twin planet, Zeos, and initially the Doctor and Romana, drawn to Atrios by the tracker, seem caught up in a simple tale of a warlike Marshal, determined to smite his foes, pitted against a pacifistic princess and her lover trying to end the conflict. Baker and Martin use the growing mania of the Marshal (John Woodvine) to tease the real story, of a shadowy figure pulling the strings from behind a mirror. It’s a slow drip of tension and narrative development, with the Doctor, Romana, and even K-9 alternately in danger and saved thanks to this sinister force, known as the Shadow (William Squire), who needs the Doctor alive, at least for the time being.

Most six part stories wind up split into disparate halves, and “The Armageddon Factor” is no exception, but here the halves find a seamless bridge, with the events of the first half having significant impact on the events of the second half. Almost literally, as the last ten seconds of the third episode cliffhanger repeat over and over (and over) throughout the next three episodes, trapped in a time loop…

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Was it absolutely necessary to land in a quagmire?

When a Doctor Who story from the 1970s involves tentacles, it’s a safe bet that Robert Holmes wrote it. His second entry in Season Sixteen’s Key to Time arc, “The Power of Kroll” (Story Production Code 5E), involves the largest squiggly appendages in the series to date, belonging to Kroll itself, a giant squid made gargantuan through the transmutative powers of the fifth segment of the Key to Time.

But it wouldn’t be a Robert Holmes story without some commentary on social, economic and/or class divisions as well, and this story centers around the exploitation of the People of the Lakes, a small band of descendants of the indigenous green-skinned humanoid inhabitants of the planet Delta Magna who were resettled on a moon by colonists from Earth thousands of years ago. With the discovery of huge pockets of methane gas on the moon, though, a corporation has set up a pilot methane catalyzing refinery to produce massive amounts of compressed protein, needed to feed the masses on Delta Magna. If successful, the subsequent swath of refineries will wind up displacing the People of the Lakes—demeaningly labelled “swampies” by the humans—yet again.

The Doctor and Romana arrive on the unnamed third moon of Delta Magna in search of the fifth segment of the Key to Time, which registers as a diffuse presence on the scanner, as though it were all around. A case of mistaken identity sees the crew of the refinery attack the Doctor, whom they mistake for the scruffy, broad-hatted Rohm-Dutt (Glyn Owen), a gun-runner delivering weapons to the People of the Lakes. While the People of the Lakes think that the Sons of Earth, a group on Delta Magna sympathetic to their cause, have supplied the worn-out rifles, in actuality the leader of the refinery, Thawn (Neil McCarthy) has hired Rohm-Dutt to supply useless arms to the “swampies” to encourage a futile uprising that will allow them to be wiped out in the name of self-defense.

The plan would have worked, except for the minor issue of the refinery drilling operations awakening the slumbering Kroll, whose metabolic functions during its long hibernation caused the methane build-up so valuable to the humans. Originally one of many giant squids transplanted from Delta Magna along with the original People of the Lakes, Kroll ate a high priest—and along with him the People’s holy relic, the fifth segment of the Key to Time in disguise—centuries ago and grew to enormous dimensions, almost a mile across, as a result. It attacks the People of the Lakes as they wait in ambush for the humans, chomping one of their number as a post-slumber snack.

Their leader, Ranquin (John Abineri), decides Kroll’s malevolence stems from the presence of the “dryfoots,” the Doctor and Romana, who have mocked Kroll’s power via Romana’s droll anthropological observations about their ritual practices. Ranquin orders our time travellers, along with Rohm-Dutt, whose treachery has been discovered, executed via the seventh holy ritual of the Great Book, the longest-lasting and worst of them all: spine stretching via contracting creeper vines. And how does the Doctor manage to escape? He sings…

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My hat’s on fire.

Up to now, the stories in Season Sixteen’s Key to Time arc have focused, to at least some extent, on said Key. The various Key segments, because of their ability to assume mundane (and fantastic) forms, drive the action, with the Fourth Doctor and Romana spending their efforts in hot pursuit of the disguised perspex chunks. But by the fourth of the six stories in the arc, David Fisher’s “The Androids of Tara” (Story Production Code 5D), the writer and production team seem to have just given up trying to integrate the MacGuffin into the narrative on offer. Here, Romana finds the fourth segment of the Key to Time within the opening eight minutes of the first of four episodes, has it promptly taken away (as she herself is captured), and then, once the plot du jour comes to a close, she and the Doctor remember to grab it before leaving as the briefest of afterthoughts. For a device that can stop time and destroy the universe, the Key to Time doesn’t get much respect.

“The Androids of Tara” does not suffer from the Key’s tentative linkage to the story, however. As often happens when Doctor Who leans into historical pieces that can draw on the BBC’s extensive costume wardrobe and Britain’s equally impressive collection of castles, the sumptuousness of the proceedings papers over many plot problems. Sadly, the title spoils the core surprise here, as on first glance, the Fourth Doctor and Romana have landed in the Middle Ages of the storybooks, with chivalric knights, bridled chargers, majestic moats, and overzealous retainers quick with a rapier. Only when the Doctor’s hat is zapped by an electric sword, and when Romana is mistaken for an android and nearly disassembled, do we realize that Tara is no ordinary Medieval society.

Interestingly, this juxtaposition of the traditional side-by-side with the futuristic has not featured prominently in the series to date. We’ve seen fallen cultures that cling to past technology as talismans (“The Face of Evil,” “Underworld“) and technology improperly transported into archaic settings (“The Time Meddler,” “The Time Warrior,” “The Ribos Operation“), but other than the Peladon stories, this seamless blending of horses and robots, of peasants and laser crossbows, represents relatively new and fertile ground for Doctor Who. David Fisher, writing his second story in a row, fails to do much with the conceit, alas, using androids as a simple means of introducing doppelgängers for several characters in this reworking of Anthony Hope’s tale of courtly intrigue, The Prisoner of Zenda.

Trite does not equal boring, however, and Fisher, with director Michael Hayes, gives both the regulars and the guest stars plenty of scenery to chew. Of note, Peter Jeffrey, playing the villainous Count Grendel, proves the most slippery and supercilious foe the Doctor has encountered since Roger Delgado’s Master, given to vainglorious proclamation and skillful swordsmanship in equal measure. Tom Baker in particular plays off of Jeffrey with ease, and their repartee, aided by Fisher’s deft touch with the bon mots, yields an enjoyable, if somewhat unmemorable, story. Well, not that anyone could ever forget one of the most horrific moments in series history: the Fourth Doctor’s scarf being burned…

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